In June 1974, at the age of
42+ years old, Father Henri J M Nouwen went to stay for 7 months as a temporary
Trappist monk in the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York. The following
passages on faith are taken from his book “The Genesee Diary,”
published in 1976:

1.Sunday, Oct 27 1974(pg 102)

John Eudes (the Abbot of the Abbey) spoke in Chapter this morning about the
monastic vocation. The occasion was the celebration of the twenty-fifth year of
monastic life of Father Bede, Father Francis, and Brother Theodore and the
twenty-fifth year of profession of Brother John Baptist. Their dates were
different but this day was set apart to celebrate them all.

One thought in John Eudes’ conference touched me very much. He said that
to respond to God’s love was a great act of faith. He compared it to
people who have felt very lonely and isolated, very rejected and unloved during
many years of their life and who suddenly meet someone who cares. For such
people it is very hard to believe that his or her care is authentic and honest.
It requires a great act of faith to accept the love that is offered to us and
to live, not with suspicion and distrust, but with the inner conviction that we
are worth being loved.

This is the great adventure of the monk: to really believe that God loves you,
to really give yourself to God in trust, even while you are aware of your
sinfulness, weaknesses, and miseries.

I
suddenly saw much better than before that one of the greatest temptations
of a monk is to doubt God’s love. Those who enter a contemplative
monastery with the intention of staying for life must be very much aware of
their own brokenness and need for redemption. If the monastic life should
lead them to a morbid introspection of their own sinfulness, it would lead them
away from God for whom they came to the monastery. Therefore, the growing
realisation of one’s sins and weaknesses must open the contemplative to a
growing awareness of God’s love and care.

During the
Eucharist John Eudes spoke about the parable of the penitent publican. He made
the observation that monks are not necessarily better or holier people than
others. Instead, he said, they might very well be weaker and more vulnerable and
come to the monastery to find the support of a community to enable them to be
faithful in their search for God and to keep responding to His continuing love.

I
was deeply moved by these thoughts. They had an unusual clarity and lucidity for
me, and I felt very grateful that I was part of this community. I also realised
that my coming here might well be seen more as a sign of my weakness than my
strength.

The passages below on
trust are taken from Father Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book “Our Greatest Gift,”
published in 1994.

Trusting the Catcher (66-67)

The Flying Rodleigs are trapeze artists who perform in the German circus
Simoneit-Barum. When the circus came to Freiburg two years ago, my friends Franz
and Reny invited me and my father to see the show. I will never forget how
enraptured I became when I first saw the Rodleigs move through the air, flying
and catching as elegant dancers. The next day, I returned to the circus to see
them again and introduced myself to them as one of their great fans. They
invited me to attend their practice sessions, gave me free tickets, asked me to
dinner, and suggested I travel with them for a week in the near future. I did,
and we became good friends.

One day, I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troupe, in his caravan,
talking about flying. He said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my
catcher. The public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but
the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second
precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump.” “How
does it work?” I asked. “The secret,” Rodleigh said, “is that the flyer does
nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to
stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely
over the apron behind the catchbar.”

“You do nothing!” I said, surprised. “Nothing,” Rodleigh repeated. “The worst
thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to
catch Joe. It’s Joe’s task to catch me. If I grabbed Joe’s wrists, I might break
them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end for both of us. A
flyer must flyer, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with
outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.”

When Rodleigh said this with so much conviction, the words of Jesus flashed
through my mind: “Father into Your hands I commend My Spirit.” Dying is
trusting in the catcher. To care for the dying is to say, “Don’t be afraid.
Remember that you are the beloved child of God. He will be there when you make
your long jump. Don’t try to grab Him; He will grab you. Just stretch out your
arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.”

The passages below
on trust are taken from Father Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book “Bread for the
Journey,” published in 1997.

1.The Spirit of Jesus Listening in us. (March
12)

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to
help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the
ego, which would like to speak but is trained to refrain itself, but the Spirit
of God within us. When we are baptized in the Spirit—-that is, when we have
received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us—-that
Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened
to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with
their sufferings and pains.

When we dare to trust fully in the power of God’s Spirit listening in us, we
will see true healing occur.

2.Keeping it Together (Sept 15)

How can we not lose our souls when everything and everybody pulls us in
different directions? How can we “keep it together” when we are constantly being
torn apart?

Jesus says, “Not a hair of your head will be lost. Your perseverance will win
you your lives” (Luke 21:18-19). We can only survive our world when we trust
that God knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. We can only keep
it together when we believe that God holds us together. We can only win our
lives when we remain faithful to the truth that every little part of us, yes,
every hair, is completely safe in the divine embrace of our Lord. To say it
differently: When we keep living a spiritual life, we have nothing to be afraid
of.

3.Claiming the Sacredness of our Being (March 21)

Are we friends with ourselves? Do we love who we are? These are important
questions because we cannot develop good friendships with others unless we have
befriended ourselves.

How then do we befriend ourselves? We have to start by acknowledging the truth
of ourselves. We are beautiful but also limited, rich but also poor, generous
but also worried about our security. Yet beyond all that we are people with
souls, sparks of the divine. To acknowledge the truth of ourselves is to claim
the sacredness of our being, without fully understanding it. Our deepest being
escapes our own mental or emotional grasp. But when we trust that our souls
are embraced by a loving God, we can befriend ourselves and reach out to others
in loving relationships.

4.The Spirit will Speak in Us (April 18)

When we are spiritually free, we do not have to worry about what to say or do in
unexpected, difficult circumstances. When we are not concerned about what others
think of us or what we will get for what we do, the right words and actions will
emerge from the center of our beings because the Spirit of God, who makes us
children of God and sets us free, will speak and act through us. Jesus says,
“When you are handed over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what
you are to say will be given to you when the times comes, because it is not you
who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in
you.”(Matthew 10:19-20)

Let’s keep trusting the Spirit of God living within us, so that we can live
freely in a world that keeps handing us over to judges and evaluators.

5.Letting go of our fear of God (Feb 28)

We
are afraid of emptiness. Spinoza speaks about our “horror vacui,” our horrendous
fear of vacancy. We like to occupy—-fill up—-every empty time and space. We want
to be occupied. And if we are not occupied we easily become preoccupied, that
is, we fill the empty spaces before we have even reached them. We fill them with
our worries, saying, “But what if. . .”

It
is very hard to allow emptiness to exist in our lives. Emptiness requires
a willingness not to be in control, a willingness to let something new and
unexpected happens. It requires trust, surrender, and openness to guidance.
God wants to dwell in our emptiness. But as long as we are afraid of God and
God’s actions in our lives, it is unlikely that we will offer our emptiness to
God. Let’s pray that we can let go of our fear of God and embrace God as the
source of all love.

6.Trusting in the Fruits (Aug 11)

We
belong to a generation that wants to see the results of our work. We want to be
productive and see with our own eyes what we have made. But that is not the way
of God’s Kingdom. Often our witness for God does not lead to tangible results.
Jesus Himself died as a failure on a cross. There was no success there to be
proud of. Still, the fruitfulness of Jesus’ life is beyond any human measure.
As faithful witnesses of Jesus we have to trust that our lives too will be
fruitful, even though we cannot see their fruit. The fruit of our lives may
be visible only to those who live after us.

What is important is how well we love. God will make our love fruitful, whether
we see that fruitfulness or not.

7.Friends as Reminders of our Truth (April 7)

Sometimes our sorrow overwhelms us so much that we no longer can believe in joy.
Life just seems a cup filled to the brim with war, violence, rejection,
loneliness, and endless disappointments.

At
times like this we need our friends to remind us that crushed grapes can
produce delicious wine. It might be hard for us to trust that any joy can
come from our sorrow, but when we start taking steps in the direction of our
friends’ advice, even when we are not yet able to feel the truth of what they
say, the joy that seemed to be lost may be found again and our sorrow may become
liveable.

8.Trusting the Catcher (Jan 11)

Trust is the basis of life. Without trust no human being can live. Trapeze
artists offer a beautiful image of this. Flyers have to trust their catchers.
They can do the most spectacular doubles, triples, or quadruples, but what
finally makes their performances spectacular are the catchers who are there for
them at the right time in the right place.

Much of our lives is flying. It is wonderful to fly in the air free as a bird,
but when God isn’t there to catch us, all our flying comes to nothing. Let’s
trust the Great Catcher.

In 1985, at the age of
53+ years old, Henri Nouwen left teaching at Harvard and move to France to live
for at least a year with Jean Vanier and his L’Arche community that looks after
the mentally handicap people, in Trosly. The following passages on trust
are taken from Father Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book “The Road to Daybreak”
published in 1988:

The
Heart Oct 18,
1985

What is the heart? It is the place of trust, a trust that can be called faith,
hope, or love, depending on how it is being manifested. Pere Thomas sees the
trusting heart as the most important characteristic of the human person. It is
not so much the ability to think, to reflect, to plan, or to produce that makes
us different from the rest of creation, but the ability to trust. It is the
heart that makes us truly human.

This vital observation helps explain why we respond with our hearts to our
surroundings long before our consciences are developed. Our consciences, which
allow us to distinguish between good and evil and thus give us a basis for moral
choice, are less in control than our hearts. Pere Thomas is convinced that much
of the crisis in the life of the Church today is connected with a lack of
knowledge of the heart. Much Church discussion today focuses on the morality of
human behaviour: premarital sex, divorce, homosexuality, birth control,
abortion, and so on. Many people have become disillusioned with the Church
because of these issues. But when the moral life gets all the attention, we are
in danger of forgetting the primacy of the mystical life, which is the life of
the heart.

Quite often the suggestion is made that the mystical life, a life in which we
enter into a unifying communion with God, is the highest fruit and most precious
reward of the moral life. The classical distinctions among the purifying way,
the illuminating way, and the unifying way, as the three progressively higher
levels of the spiritual life, have strengthened this suggestion. Thus we have
come to see the mystical life as the life of the happy few who reach the prayer
of total surrender.

The greatest insight of Pere Thomas---an insight in which the best of his
theology and the best of his pastoral experience with handicapped people
merge---is that the mystical life lies at the beginning of our existence and not
just at its end. We are born in intimate communion with the God who created us
in love. We belong to God from the moment of our conception. Our heart is that
divine gift which allows us to trust not just God, but also our mother, our
father, our family, ourselves, and the world. Pere Thomas is convinced that very
small children have a deep, intuitive knowledge of God, a knowledge of the
heart, that sadly is often obscured and even suffocated by the many systems of
thought we gradually cultivate. Handicapped people, who have such a limited
ability to learn, can let their heart speak easily and thus reveal a mystical
life that for many intelligent people seems unreachable.

By
speaking about the heart as the deepest source of the spiritual life, the life
of faith, hope, and love, Pere Thomas wanted to show me that human affections do
not lead us where our hearts want to lead us. The heart is much wider and deeper
than our affections. It is before and beyond the distinctions between sorrow and
joy, anger and lust, fear and love. It is the place where all is one in God, the
place where we truly belong, the place from which we come and to which we always
yearn to return.

I
now realise that my “simple” question about my affection required a fuller
response than I had expected. I need to relearn the central place of the
mystical experience in human life. (pg 329-330)

The following passages on trust are taken from Father Henri J.M. Nouwen’s
book “Show me the Way,” published in 1992.

1.Passion Sunday
(pg 101)

Even though Jesus went directly against the human inclination to avoid suffering
and death, His followers realised that it was better to live the truth with open
eyes than to live their lives in illusion.

Suffering and death belong to the narrow road of Jesus. Jesus does not glorified
them, or call them beautiful, good, or something to be desired. Jesus does not
call for heroism or suicidal self-sacrifice. No, Jesus invites us to look at the
reality of our existence and reveals this harsh reality as the way to new life.
The core message of Jesus is that real joy and peace can never be reached
while bypassing suffering and death, but only by going right through them.

We
could say: We really have no choice. Indeed, who escapes suffering and death?
Yet there is still a choice. We can deny the reality of life, or we can face it.
When we face it not in despair, but with the eyes of Jesus, we discover that
where we least expect it, something is hidden that holds a promise stronger than
death itself. Jesus lived His life with the trust that God’s love is stronger
than death and that death therefore does not have the last word. He invites us
to face the painful reality of our existence with the same trust. This is what
Lent is all about. (Translated from Gebete aus der Stille. 61-62)

2.Thursday
after Ash Wednesday (pg 15)

Whenever Jesus says to the people He has healed: “Your faith has saved you,”
He is saying that they have found new life because they have surrendered in
complete trust to the love of God revealed in Him. Trusting in the unconditional
love of God: that is the way to which Jesus calls us. The more firmly you
grasp this, the more readily will you be able to perceive why there is so much
suspicion, jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, violence, and discord
in our world. Jesus Himself interprets this by comparing God’s love to the
light. He says: “thought the light has come to the world, people have preferred
darkness to light because their deeds were evil. And indeed, everybody who does
wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up;
but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing
may plainly appear as done in God.”

Jesus sees the evil in this world as a lack of trust in God’s love. He makes
us see that we persistently fall back on ourselves, rely more on ourselves than
on God, and we inclined more to love of self than to love of God. So we remain
in the darkness. If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge in
joy and gratitude that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and
is offered to us in love. (Letters to Marc, 52-53)

The passages below are taken
from Father Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book “In the House of the Lord,”
published in 1986:

1.Our
Action reflects our Faith (27-28)

When we enter into the household of God, we come to realise that the
fragmentation of humanity and its agony grow from the false supposition that all
human beings have to fight for their right to be appreciated and loved. In
the house of God’s love we come to see with new eyes and hear with new ears and
thus recognise that all people, whatever their race, religion, sex, wealth,
intelligence, or background, belong to the same house. God’s house has no
dividing walls or closed doors. ‘I am the door,’ Jesus says. ‘Anyone who
enters through Me will be safe’ (John 10:9). The more fully we enter into the
house of love, the more clearly we see that we are there together with all
humanity and that in and through Christ we are brothers and sisters, members of
one family.

In
the house of God we are consecrated to the truth; that is, part of God’s
betrothal with God’s people. The word betrothal---which includes the word troth
(truth)---beautifully expresses the personal quality of truth. We truthfully
belong together in God. This is the spiritual basis of solidarity.

Here too we find the ground of all Christian action. As people leads us into
the house of God and God’s people, so action leads us back into the world to
work there for reconciliation, unity, and peace. Once we have come to know
the truth we want to act truthfully and reveal to the world its true nature.
All Christian action---whether it is visiting the sick, feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, or working for a more just and peaceful society---is a
manifestation of the human solidarity revealed to us in the house of God. It
is not an anxious human effort to create a better world. It is a confident
expression of the truth that in Christ, death, evil, and destruction have been
overcome. It is not a fearful attempt to restore a broken order. It is a joyful
assertion that in Christ all order has already been restored. It is not a
nervous effort to bring divided people together, but a celebration of an already
established unity. Thus action is not activism. An activist wants to heal,
restore, redeem, and re-create, but those acting within the house of God point
through their action to the healing, restoring, redeeming and re-creating
presence of God.

Jean Vanier understands this very well. When you see the many small homes for
the handicapped, you wonder if Jean and his co-workers could not use their time
and energy more efficiently. While the needs of the world clamour for our
attention, hundreds of capable, intelligent men and women spend their time,
often all of their time, feeding broken people, helping them walk, just being
with them, and giving them the small comfort of a loving word, a gentle touch,
or an encouraging smile. To anyone trying to succeed in our society, which
is oriented toward efficiency and control, these people are wasting their time.
What they do is highly inefficient, unsuccessful, and even useless.
Jean Vanier, however, believes that in this useless work for the poor the truth
of God’s perfect love for all people is revealed.